More news of the stars today: snappers armed with extremely powerful lenses have secured pics of "a very intimate couple", "tightly bound" and "dancing around each other in a diabolic waltz" as the darker, dominant one strips the other.
Artist's impression of the X-1 black hole / Wolf-Rayet binary in NGC 300. Credit: ESO …

Grinning like a loon....

Far-off?

Of course all other galaxies are a long way away ("You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts compared to space"), but at 6Mly NGC300 is practically on our doorstep for a large spiral galaxy, less than 3x the distance to Andromeda.

That's because it's an artists impression...

@abigsmurf

The jets are (probably, everything about black-holes is conjecture) a result of the massive magnetic fields generated by black-holes. Just as the Sun has a powerful and complex magnetic fields, so do black-holes.

These magnetic fields fling charged particles out along the axis of rotation.

The magnetic force is several orders of magnitude more powerful than the force of gravity, which seems obvious when you think that a little fridge magnet can overcome the combined gravitational force of the Earth. This is what allows the black hole to force some particles away from it, while consuming others.

CG Image

The image will be computer generated, you'd never optically resolve anything this small at this distance.

The data showing how the system is behaving will come from high resolution spectrometer observations showing the doppler shifts of light emitted by the various objects and gasses involved over time. The image will be based on this with a good dollop of artistic license.

I think the jets are due to the rotation of the black hole 'corkscrewing' its magnetic field lines which then catch some of the inflowing ionised material and accelerate it back out before it reaches the event horizon.

The event horizon will be relatively small for a solar mass black hole, about a third of the diameter of the sun if I remember correctly.

LHC?

@ Image doesn't seem real

"Given how speccly ultra long range pics tend to be, that's a very detailed image. How much 'enhancing' has been done?"

Hover over it and you'll see the alt text says "Artist's impression of...". It's quite obviously a rendering done for clarification.

"Also has there actually been any explanation of how black holes are able to project those narrow matter/light streams when they suck up objects of huge mass?"

Yes, it's a well-explained phenomena in astrophysics circles. the plume of ejecta isn't from within the black hole itself, it's caused by the funneling effect of a doughnut-shaped ring of cooler gas and dust that surrounds the black hole, and is an artefact of the temperature difference. It would typically move at some million or so miles per hour.

Check the image hover label

Although it doesn't say in the article body, the label data associated with the image (displayed when you hover the mouse pointer over it) states that it is an artist's impression, so that fact wasn't /totall/ ignored :)